ART REVIEW : MUSEUM’S SHOW IS FIT FOR A KING

Let it be said right up front that “Collection for a King: Old Master Paintings from the Dulwich Picture Gallery,” at the County Museum of Art, includes some quite wonderful and justly famous paintings.

Rembrandt so sensitively observes his “Girl Leaning on a Stone Pedestal” that the gentle character draws you into her reverie. Bartolome Esteban Murillo’s “The Flower Girl”--by comparison an extrovert--offers her radiant youth to her audience along with a nest of full-blooming roses. The Spanish master created his most highly regarded genre portrait with a peachy palette and dazzling brushwork.

The exhibition (which runs through Jan. 5, as a companion piece to “Masterpieces from the Cone Collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art”) has other striking portraits: a courtly likeness of “Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy, Prince of Oneglia” and a wispy, deathbed portrait of a fabled beauty, “Lady Venetia Digby,” both by Sir Anthony Van Dyck, and notable small works by Thomas Gainsborough.

Among the 36 master paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries are felicitous landscapes, earthy genre scenes and ambitious interpretations of biblical themes, most notably by Nicholas Poussin. His imposing canvas, “The Triumph of David,” has the young hero marching through an exultant crowd, carrying Goliath’s outsize head on a stick high above him. The broad sweep of action in this classical-style painting is countered by Poussin’s tight focus in “Rinaldo and Armida.” This vibrant jewel portrays a Christian warrior lulled to sleep by a Saracen heroine who means to kill him but instead falls in love with her quarry.

Pictures, fine pictures all around, but now that their worth has been noted, let it also be said that the story behind the collection they represent is so interesting that it threatens to eclipse appreciation of the artworks.

Most of these paintings (and many more) were indeed chosen for royalty--Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, king of Poland. Frustrated in his administrative ambitions and “enlightened by a youthful spell as one of Catherine the Great’s lovers,” according to the exhibition catalogue, “he worked to create ‘a new Poland’ through the arts.” Stanislaus chose as his agent Noel Desenfans, a successful if sometimes notorious London dealer who collaborated with Francis Bourgeois, a decidedly minor painter.

Their timing, the 1790s, was propitious. “These works were collected at the greatest moment ever for buying pictures in London,” said Giles Waterfield, director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, during a preview at the County Museum of Art. “The market was in ferment, partly as a result of the French Revolution.” The turmoil put French collections up for sale in England at the same time as enterprising British dealers were bringing Italian works into the country.

Desenfans acquired about 180 paintings for Stanislaus, but the king never took possession of them--or paid for them. He was forced to abdicate in 1795, when Poland was partitioned among Russia, Prussia and Austria. Searching for a buyer, Desenfans unsuccessfully offered the collection to the czar of Russia and then to the English government for a proposed national gallery. At Desenfans’ death, in 1810, the paintings went to Bourgeois who eventually gave the collection to Dulwich College (so that it would be kept intact) and provided funds for a new gallery to display the paintings.

Some of the best works that grace that British showplace are painted on panel and couldn’t be subjected to the changing conditions of travel. Waterfield has nonetheless selected a satisfying range of pictures, from Charles Lebrun’s bloody interpretation of “ The Massacre of the Innocents” to a broadly painted floral still-life by Jan van Huysum. The exhibition plays most of its best cards first, following an introductory gallery of masterful, often showy paintings with less prepossessing works. That makes for a bit of a let-down, but the relatively small and quiet pieces are often sharply attuned to gentle beauty and everyday pleasure.

Apart from the attraction of individual pictures, the most interesting aspect of “Collection for a King” is its evidence of late 18th-Century and early 19th-Century taste. Waterfield noted a tendency toward “soft” pictures and the king’s preference for such artists as Murillo, Van Dyck, Lebrun, Poussin and Rembrandt. He also mentioned the absence early Renaissance paintings, then considered “too primitive,” and of El Greco, who had not been “rediscovered” during the collection’s formation.

The Dulwich Picture Gallery is said to be one of the best collections in England remaining in private hands. Now that authenticity of the pictures has been sorted out and “mistakes” relegated to the gallery’s closets, the collection’s strength rests in works from Dutch, Flemish and French Schools.

I’ve never been to the Dulwich Picture Gallery and, according to Waterfield, neither have most well-traveled Americans. “You seem to find it easier to go from Los Angeles to London than to travel the four miles from London to Dulwich,” he jested. If Waterfield gets his wish, “Collection for a King” will change that. “The primary purpose of this exhibition is to make a collection that’s so fine and so little known available to a larger public,” he said.

The exhibition, which premiered at the National Gallery in Washington, will make its third and final appearance at the National Academy of Design in New York, Jan. 21 to Feb. 16.